I'm not a current participant, but I look forward to competing in the future. I find the discussion of native/international rules interesting.

As an analogy, alpine ski racing in the United States separately maintains its own set of equipment rules. This is costly, confusing, and leads to various growing pains when young athletes move to international competition. Much of the membership would prefer the simpler, unified international ruleset, but a small mafia with the free time to join committees in the US continues to reinvent the wheel for their own purposes. It appears common sense is prevailing and the trend over the last few years has been towards normalization.

Some here have discussed the issue of licensing fees. Surely one does not need to pay the international license fee for every competitor in order to photocopy the rulebook. I have participated in several sports where rules and methods are copied by one organization without fees paid to belong and be ranked in the original organization. Running a local ranking system is much simpler than running an entirely separate set of rules.

I don't personally know Sean or Tom Kelley but when Tom replied with a variety of petty personal attacks I was not impressed.

I believe the biggest problem with a separate set of rules is the negative impact on performance at events that matter by the few who excel to that level. The results (or lack thereof) speak for themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_..._Championships

Hopefully I'll compete with some of you in the future,
Garrett McEwen

PS: Tom, how many youtube followers do you have? I just checked and the SSA official youtube account has 362 followers. That's approximately half what an average teenage girl has. Maybe lets not harass a guy that actually tries to share Soaring with a broader audience in the US.